Out of Frame: Star Trek
J.J. Abrams takes the fresh faced new crew of the Enterprise where no Star Trek movie has gone before.
***There's a plot point discussed in the first parapraph that a couple of people have called foul on; my feeling is that if it's exposition and happens in the first five minutes of the movie, then talking about it hardly qualifies as a spoiler, but if you want to go in as an utterly blank slate, you may want to skip it. So, that said, let this serve as fair warning for a potential spoiler.***
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then J.J. Abrams' reboot (and reinvigoration) of the Star Trek series can be looked at as both a big sloppy wet kiss to the late Gene Roddenberry, or a sneering middle finger flashed in the direction of the sci-fi impresario. On the one hand, Abrams lovingly recreates the universe conceived by Roddenberry, with so many nods to tradition, and Trekkie-centric in-jokes that you'll need a scorecard to keep up. On the other, Abrams starts the movie with a history-altering time-travel event that essentially allows him to rewrite the entire Star Trek mythology from scratch. Yes, this is a prequel, and the events of the television series and the ad nauseum pileup of subsequent films haven't happened yet. But Abrams goes a step farther and says that most of these things are never going to happen. In the film's first sequence, the newborn James T. Kirk's father is killed in the act of saving baby Kirk and his mother from time traveling Romulans from the future, and this act has a ripple effect that changes the fortunes of every character in the series.
It's a neat trick, and it's going to piss off the convention-going, pointy prosthetic-eared crowd to no end. But in terms of finding fresh life in a universe that long ago went stale, it's a stroke of genius. Let's face it, Star Trek movies stopped pretending they were for anyone but die hard fans a good while back, a fact to which their modest budgets and increasingly modest box office success attested. Once they completely jumped the humpback whale shark in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, general audiences could be excused for caring less and less. And as good as Wrath of Khan is, it still feels like medium-budget soundstage science fiction. Its worlds rarely feel bigger than a studio backlot. The underrated Star Trek: The Motion Picture, unfairly maligned for having the temerity to try out a more thoughtful, less action-oriented tone than the TV series, is really the only entry in the entire series that had a broad sense of scope, that paints to the edges of the canvas. Until now.
The look of the film is the first thing that Abrams does right. Star Trek is a visual marvel. And it ought to be: the movie's budget is roughly equal to the last three films in the franchise combined. But more importantly, Abrams uses all that cash wisely; one need only look at the lackluster Wolverine to know that throwing $150 million at a movie is no guarantee of satisfying eye candy. Here, space looks infinite and majestic. The Enterprise looks like a complex, real piece of technology. In fact, once you get down within the guts of the ship, it's all miles and miles of industrial piping, lacking any futuristic gloss at all, which seems far more likely than some of the previous visions of 23rd century engineering in the series. And the impressive action sequences have an epic sweep that blow away anything in the previous films. Abrams is a natural movie director who has made his mark in television, unlike previous Trek directors like Leonard Nimoy and Jonathan Frakes, who are TV guys making an often shaky leap to the larger world of film. And Abrams' greater facility with the medium comes through at every turn.
More importantly, Abrams is a franchise-minded entertainer, which is why he's done so well on television, and why Roddenberry would probably grudgingly adore what he's done here, even if Abrams does so with such a blatant disregard for the starship that Gene built. But where Roddenberry was all about message, Abrams — as any Lost fan will tell you — is all about character. Not content to just make this the Spock and Kirk show, with supporting players largely reduced to broad strokes, Abrams makes it clear that he's interested in Star Trek as an ongoing ensemble piece. He's aided by the fact that in making this an origin story, he's expected to flesh out these characters' histories. But he goes farther than that, making many of these characters richer in these two hours than they ever were in the past. Chief among these improvements is the increased role given to Uhura, who is no longer relegated to being a glorified switchboard operator: she's now an expert linguist, more adept with languages straight out of Starfleet Academy than the Communications Officer she replaces on the Enterprise. Scotty, on the other hand, is still mostly here for comic relief, and still somewhat underused, (particularly taking into account the considerable comedic talents Simon Pegg brings to the role and the obvious glee he takes in it), but his character is set up for a much larger role in future sequels. And you can bet Abrams is planning on spinning this story out in multiple sequels.
Thing is, you actually want to see what happens next to this crew. A big part of that are the uniformly strong performances. Karl Urban is particularly engaging as McCoy, perfectly imitating the Doctor's Mississippi drawl without ever descending into caricature. And Chris Pine goes the opposite direction with Kirk, avoiding Shatner-esque dramatic pauses entirely, wisely not delivering even a hint of the most mocked speech pattern in pop culture. These performances, and the great character drama that they're engaged in, is in fact so thoroughly entertaining that the climax of this film is a slight let down. Not only is it disappointing to have to leave this crew, but it feels perfunctory and nearly an afterthought, driven mainly by the need to tie up the story. Here's where Abrams' TV pedigree shows: he's just not used to having to wrap up a story in two hours. Luckily, Star Trek is good enough that this doesn't have to be the end of the story. And for those of us who aren't dogmatic fans of the franchise, there's a reason to actually be interested again.
Star Trek opens tomorrow at theaters all over the area.